Week 7: Have you ever had a fic change your opinion of a character?

In general, whatever "external input" gives me my first impression of a character tends to stick, whether it's consuming the canon or reading in a fandom before I see/read the canon it belongs to. In the latter case, most of the time I've been lucky enough to read fics that accurately captured the canon in a very IC way (almost every Eroica fic written or archived by Kadorienne, for example). The only time that reading before viewing led me astray and set me up for disappointment was in Arslan: most fics featuring Daryun/Narsus made them seem almost canon, which… they really didn't seem to be when I finally saw the anime, even with my slash goggles set to the highest setting.

Writing is more of a 'Yes'. When there are characters I have to write—characters I previously had little to no interest in (or knowledge of)—for a contest, an exchange, or because canonically they need to be in a story, the process of digging and poking almost always gives them enough new dimensions that they become interesting. This happened with several characters in Seed, with a handful of characters I had to write for the YGOFF contest (primarily the Bakurae), with Pegasus and Jounouchi in the Temenos stories, and with Rommath and Astalor in Deceiver.